My evil twin

One of the creepiest of psychological phenomena is the Capgras delusion.  Sometimes associated with schizophrenia, the Capgras delusion is the conviction that your friends and family have been replaced by perfect doubles.  It also occasionally occurs with acute prosopagnosia ("face blindness"), usually caused by a stroke that affects the limbic system.  In this case, the part of the brain that usually recognizes faces (the temporal lobe) is functioning normally, but the part of the brain that associates faces with emotions (the limbic system) is not, so you have the impression of seeing someone whom you recognize... but they don't "feel right."

This idea has been riffed upon in a number of works of fiction, most famously The Body Snatchers, the Jack Finney novel which was the basis of the movie(s) The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  I still remember what for me was the most shudder-inducing moment in the book.  The town doctor is seeing a patient for something minor, and she (the patient) remarks that her cousin Wilma is acting oddly, that Wilma thinks that "Uncle Ira isn't Uncle Ira any more."  The doctor decides to talk to Wilma about it:

Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense.  "I've been waiting for today," she whispered.  "Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did."  Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper.  "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck, he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it.  You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut.  But when his neck is shaved, you can.  Well, today -- I've been waiting for this! -- today, he got a haircut..."

 I sat forward, suddenly excited.  "And the scar's gone? You mean..."

 "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing.  "It's there -- the scar -- exactly like Uncle Ira's!"

And you sense, of course, that however foolish it sounds, Wilma's right; her uncle actually isn't himself any more.  That someone could be replaced, down to the detail of a tiny scar -- well, it gave me what the Scots call "the cauld grue."  And later, when Wilma sees the doctor again, and laughingly tells him that she'd been acting so silly, of course Uncle Ira is the real Uncle Ira, I shivered even harder.  Because that meant that they had gotten her, too.

The concept is also reflected in the legend of the doppelgänger, or "double walker," an individual out there lurking in the shadows who looks exactly like you.  It's interesting how many cultures have a myth based upon this concept.  The vardøger of Norse myth, the etiäinen in Finland, the ka of the Ancient Egyptians -- all were physical copies of your body, down to the last freckle, and if you happened to run into it, it could result in anything from bad luck to replacement to death.  Even in the changeling myths of Ireland we see this concept; that the Elves could replace a normal human infant with an Elvish copy.  The changeling, they said, would grow up wild and uncontrollable, and would have violent reactions in certain situations (especially in church during the sacraments).  I've often wondered if this last story, however, was invented to explain chronically unruly children.  "He certainly can't be my real son, any son of mine wouldn't act this way.  I know... it was those damned Elves!"

It's also interesting to note that a number of famous people, including Goethe, John Donne, Percy Shelley, and Abraham Lincoln, all reported that they'd seen doppelgängers at some time during their lives (Donne's vision was of his wife, who was bedridden at the time). 

So, what could cause such a pervasive myth?  Once again, what we're probably looking at is a brain-wiring issue.  A paper in Nature, published in 2006, described how a sensation of being in the presence of your double could be induced by electrical stimulation of the left temporal-parietal junction.  This was discovered quite by accident -- the patient in question was receiving the procedure as a treatment for epilepsy (she was otherwise mentally completely normal).  While the stimulation was being applied, she had the sudden, and unpleasant, sensation of having a duplicate of herself immediately behind her.  As soon as the stimulation was ceased, the sensation vanished.

Our sense of identity is so wrapped up not only in our knowledge of our own minds and bodies, but in our feeling of uniqueness, that it is profoundly unsettling to consider even in a fictional setting that there might be someone who was our exact duplicate.  That such a duplicate could replace us, and fool even our friends and family, is one of the creepiest ideas I know of.  Our recognition of people we know is based on a mental network of knowledge, impressions, and emotional responses, both conscious and subconscious -- and when any bit of that network isn't working, it can result in one of the most disturbing and frightening delusions known to medical science.

All shook up

As if we needed something else to worry about, given that the Rapture is going to occur two weeks from now; there is a massive earthquake scheduled to hit Rome on Wednesday.

Many Italians are in a lather about the alleged prognostications of Raffaele Bendandi, who supposedly could predict earthquakes.  The story is that in 1923, Bendandi warned of an earthquake that would strike along the Adriatic coast.  He was off by two days, but afterwards newspapers published front-page stories entitled "The Man Who Forecasts Earthquakes," and Benandi's reputation was born.  He was even awarded a knighthood by Mussolini.

His theory, if you can call it that, is that earthquakes are not caused by motion of tectonic plates; in fact, plate tectonics was not even discovered until the early 1960s.  Bendandi thought that earthquakes were caused by the position of the earth relative to the positions of the moon and the other planets.

So, what we have here is basically tectonic astrology.

Add this to the fact that even the followers of Bendandi's ideas aren't clear as to whether he forecast an earthquake in Rome on May 11.  Paola Lagorio, president of the Benandi Association of Italy, has made an official statement that Bendandi's writings don't mention an earthquake in Rome in 2011.  We can't ask Bendandi himself, because he's been dead for 32 years.

This hasn't stopped a lot of people in Rome from getting all shook up.  Reporters have interviewed a number of people, and their responses have varied from "Meh" (the minority, if the reporting is accurate), to asking for the day off so as to be with family, to fleeing the city for the safety of the countryside.

A chef, Tania Cotorobai, was quoted as saying, "I don't know if I really believe it, but if you look at the internet you see everything and the opposite of everything, and it ends up making you nervous."  She is one of the ones who plans to leave Rome when the fateful day approaches.

And this is why we, and apparently the Italians, should do a better job teaching critical thinking in public schools.  Yes, you will find "everything and the opposite of everything" on the internet.  However, to quote Richard Dawkins:  "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."  Our brains are perfectly capable of using facts, evidence, and logic to ascertain the truth.  The problem is, people are seldom taught to do so.  And given that lack of training, many of us fall back on emotions and hunches -- which are notorious for feeling highly persuasive, but often giving us the wrong answer.

So it probably won't be business as usual in Rome on Wednesday, all because a long-dead tectonic astrologer may or may not have predicted a devastating earthquake for May 11.  Given the response that the people of Rome are having, I wonder what May 21 (Rapture Day) and December 21, 2012 (the Mayan World Destruction Festival) will be like.  I might just stay home myself, but not because I think the world's going to end -- more that I don't want to be outside while the loons are migrating.

HAARPing on the facts

While we're discussing conspiracy theories, may as well take a look at what journalist Sharon Weinberger calls "the Moby Dick of conspiracy theories;" HAARP.

HAARP, which stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is a study facility jointly funded by the military and by the University of Alaska.  Its stated goal is to use collimated beams of high energy (3.6 MW), high-frequency (2.8-10 MHz) electromagnetic radiation into the ionosphere, to determine how the ionosphere reacts.  This could have important ramifications regarding the operations of communications and surveillance satellites, whose signals have to penetrate the ionosphere.  The idea is that if we tweak the ionosphere to see how it responds, it will in theory become easier to manage its reaction to natural processes (e.g. solar flares) and minimize disruption of satellite communication.

Well, that's what they're telling us, anyway.  HAARP certainly has a sinister look; a field of spidery antennas up in the middle of nowhere in the Alaskan tundra.  It figured prominently in the animated series GI Joe: Resolute,  the Marvel Comics game X-Men Legends, and Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura.  Also, the movie The Core, which is perhaps the single stupidest science-based movie ever made, featured a thinly-disguised HAARP clone called "DESTINI."

You remember how in Galaxy Quest, the aliens had been receiving transmissions of human television shows and thought that all of them, including Gilligan's Island, were historical documentaries?  I think something like that must have happened here.  Evidently someone overlooked the fact that The Core is shelved in the "Fiction" section of Rent-a-Flick, because to listen to these people talk, the directors of HAARP are trying to kill us.   Here is a brief list of things HAARP has allegedly caused:

1)  Hurricane Katrina.
2)  The Haitian earthquake.
3)  The Japanese earthquake and resulting tsunami.
4)  The 2003 European heat wave.
5)  The recent outbreak of tornadoes in the American Southeast.

In addition, HAARP could potentially cause:

1)  The "sky to focus light like a lens and burn great swaths of forest."
2)  The magnetic poles to suddenly flip.
3)  The fracture of continental tectonic plates.
4)  Volcanic eruptions.
5)  A dramatic increase in the radiation output of the sun, which would cause the Earth to fry like a peep in a microwave.

No one seems to be quite sure how HAARP could cause all of this, but that doesn't seem to matter much to the conspiracy theorists, a reaction I find frankly baffling.  Whenever someone proposes something weird, my first demand is, "show me the mechanism."  If you claim that wearing amethyst crystals around your neck improves your health, tell me how it works, and don't rely on goofy, undefinable words like "psychic energy fields."  To my enduring astonishment, it seems like most people don't think that way.  If something appeals to their sense of the mysterious, or if it validates their impression of the government or the scientific establishment as being evil, or if they learned it from a recognized scientific expert like Jesse Ventura, they swallow it whole.

Once again, I feel obliged to say that I don't think it's outside of the realm of possibility that our military might be trying to develop super-powerful weapons.  It's just that I don't think that HAARP is it.  And as for using a pulsed electromagnetic beam to cause earthquakes, well, I'm sorry, I have to call "bullshit" on that one.  HAARP can't create a Star Trek style tractor beam to pull on earthquake zones; it can't fracture tectonic plates; it can't whip up hurricanes and tornadoes.  And when I read that someone thought that HAARP could somehow cause the atmosphere to "focus light like a lens," my first thought was, "you don't have the first clue how lenses work, do you?"

It seems to me that in the minds of many people, Big Evil Government Agencies have replaced the ancient gods.  When the Vikings heard thunder, they thought that Thor was shouting and throwing his hammer.  When the Greeks saw a volcano erupt, Hephaestus was working in his forge.  Now?  If an earthquake occurs, it's not enough just to say, "Well, Japan is in a geological earthquake zone, we understand the science of what happened" -- we have to invent the god HAARPius who Smote The Land With His Mighty Beam of Destruction.  Magical thinking will, apparently, be with us always.

Beliefs, assumptions, and bin Laden death conspiracies

There are three reasons to lack belief in something.  I present them in decreasing order of strength.

The first situation is when the belief requires a great many ad hoc assumptions, and simultaneously, there is a large quantity of evidence against it.  An example of this is astrology.  A belief in astrology requires that you not only break Ockham's Razor (the principle that the simplest explanation that adequately explains all of the facts is the most likely to be correct), but that you ignore the many controlled studies showing there to be no correlation whatsoever between a person's astrological sign and his/her personality.

The second is when there is no particular evidence against the belief, but also very little for it; and it also runs up against the sharp edge of Ockham's Razor.  Belief in the existence of Bigfoot is one of many examples of this sort of thing.  The evidence, such as it is, consists of fuzzy videos and photographs, footprints, and anecdotal stories, all of which are obvious candidates for fakery.  The simplest consistent explanation -- that the sightings of Bigfoot are hoaxes -- requires far fewer assumptions than the idea that there is a large primate in the forests of the Pacific Northwest that has somehow never left behind a single piece of unequivocal hard evidence.

The third, and weakest, is when we simply lack data.  For example, I am sometimes asked by my biology students if the vocalizations of whales and dolphins are actually language.  My answer:  we don't know.  Language -- a system of arbitrary representational symbols expressing concepts -- is only easy to recognize if you know the rulebook.  In this case, it may be that whales are using language, or it may be that their sounds are simply non-symbolic communication, such as we see in the barking of dogs.  The bottom line is that at present, there is no reason to believe that whales are using language, but also no particular reason to disbelieve.  Ockham's Razor remains unbroken either way, so we simply suspend judgment and wait for more evidence to surface.

Which brings me, unfortunately, to Osama bin Laden.

When the US announced a few days ago that bin Laden had been killed by a task force of SEALs, the first reaction was one of relief.  Justice, people said, had been done at last.  President Obama's approval ratings jumped, and even Glenn Beck gave some grudging props to the administration.  But then came the announcement that bin Laden had been buried at sea, and the photographs of bin Laden's corpse would not be released.  The explanation was that the hasty disposal of the body was to render it impossible for bin Laden's followers to turn his burial site into a shrine, and the decision not to make the photographs public was based on a desire not to inflame hostility and retribution on the part of devout Muslims who might consider the posting of such gruesome photographs as a sign of disrespect.

And then photographs appeared online anyway.  They were, the posters said, leaked from military sources.  Analysts were quick to point out that they were photoshopped fakes; one of them, in fact, was an amalgam of an image of bin Laden and a still of a corpse grabbed from the movie Black Hawk Down.  Conspiracy theorists began to squawk that the whole thing smacked of a coverup.  Orly Taitz, now that President Obama has released his birth certificate, was apparently fishing around for something to do after she ruled out "shut the hell up and get a real job," and decided to join the fray.  On her website, she asks the question of why bin Laden wasn't properly ID'd, or (better yet) taken alive.  I guess she's waiting for bin Laden's long-form death certificate to be released.

The theories began to get wilder and wilder.  In an interview, Steve Pieczenik, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the 1980s and 1990s, has claimed that the whole thing is a red herring -- that bin Laden actually died in 2001 of Marfan Syndrome, shortly after 9-11.  Any videos and audio clips of him after that time were either fakes or were recordings made prior to his death.  He has stated that he is prepared to testify before a grand jury that this is true.

Allow me to point out that he is also the author of psycho-political fiction.  I'll leave you to decide if this is relevant.

Other conspiracy theorists claim that bin Laden was killed last year, and his body frozen, to be trotted out to give the President a boost when (1) the 2012 election was approaching, (2) his ratings appeared to be falling, or (3) both.  Taitz, while not specifically espousing this theory, has wondered aloud how it can be a coincidence that the whole birth certificate thing was resolved only a few days before bin Laden was killed.  "It was a move calculated to distract the public," Taitz said, which I suppose turns her from a "birther" into a "deather."

And then, of course, there are the people who believe that bin Laden is still alive, and that the whole thing was a hoax from beginning to end.

So, where along the lines of belief does all of this fall?

Well, first of all, let's look at the evidence we have -- the administration's story and the pictures of the compound.  Not, I will admit, a wealth of hard data to go by.  So failing concrete evidence, we have to fall back on Ockham's Razor.  What explanation fits the known facts, while requiring the fewest ad hoc assumptions?

We have, on the one hand, a story that some Navy SEALs flew into Pakistan in a couple of helicopters, broke into some random house, ran about firing their weapons, and didn't kill Osama bin Laden (who either was elsewhere at the time, or else already dead, depending on which version you go for).  Having thus successfully not killed bin Laden, they got back on their helicopters, perhaps with the body of someone else, and flew out to waiting ships, where a fake funeral was held.  A great many soldiers, and their commanding officers, were complicit in this coverup, as presumably all of the people in charge of the raid would have to have known perfectly well that bin Laden wasn't there (and if they didn't before, they figured it out pretty quickly afterwards).  Despite the number of people who at this point know that it was all faked, no one has spoken up.  As far as the purpose of this jiggery-pokery, all of it was done purely to boost Obama's ratings.

On the other hand, we simply accept that in the default of evidence to the contrary, the administration's story is substantially true. 

So, we basically have a case of Bigfoot here.  Is it impossible that bin Laden is still alive, or that he died years ago?  No, any more than it is impossible that Bigfoot exists.  But there is a difference between "possible" and "probable," a distinction on which many people seem to be unclear.  If you have an improbable, convoluted explanation for something, it isn't enough just to say "it could be so."  In these situations, we invoke another principle -- ECREE, or "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence."  It is not the responsibility of those of us who disbelieve in bin Laden death conspiracies to prove our case, any more than I should be required to "prove" why I don't believe in Bigfoot.  The bottom line is, if you think President Obama is lying, show us your evidence.  Saying "he could be" just isn't sufficient.

The 2.5 gigahamster hard drive

Whenever people call computers "time-saving devices," I always chuckle in a sardonic fashion.

My computer at work could probably qualify as an antique.  It is the single slowest computer in the history of mankind.  When I get to school, the first thing I do is to turn my computer on.  I know that with many computers, you can get yourself a cup of coffee while you're waiting for them to boot up.  With this one, I could fly down to Colombia and harvest the coffee beans myself.  It also makes these peculiar little squeaky grunts as it's starting up; I suspect that this is because, instead of a hard drive, this computer is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel.  Perhaps it's slow in the morning because the hamster needs time to wake up, take a shower, get himself a bowl of hamster chow for breakfast, etc.

The network I work on is also astonishingly slow.  Printing especially seems to take forever, which is kind of ironic, because the printer I use is in the room right next door to mine.  When I send a document to the printer, it sometimes prints right away, and sometimes it apparently routs the job through a network located in Bangladesh.  One time it took twenty minutes to print a sign for my classroom that had six words on it.  During that time the printer sat there like an obtuse lump, grumbling in an ill-tempered sort of way, its screen saying only the word "Calibrating..."  I yelled at it, "What the hell do you have to calibrate?  It's six words on one 8.5"x11" piece of paper!  There!  You're calibrated!"  But it didn't listen, of course.  They never do.

On the other hand, to be fair, perhaps I don't really merit a fast computer.  I am not, I admit readily, the most technologically adept person in the world.  I can find my way around the internet, and handle a variety of word processing and database software well enough.  That,  however, represents the limits of my techspertise.  I periodically have guest speakers in my classroom, who invariably want to do some sort of electronic presentation requiring hardware and/or software that has to be brought in and hooked up to my computer in order to work.  I always handle these requests with phenomenal speed and efficiency.  "Bruce," I say, " can you come set this up for me?"

Bruce is our computer tech guy.  Bruce has forgotten more about computers than I'll ever know.  When something goes wrong with my computer, my usual response is to weep softly while smacking my forehead on the keyboard.  This is seldom helpful.  Bruce, on the other hand, will take one look at my computer, smile in his kindly way, and say something like, "Gordon, you forgot to defragment the RAM on your Z-drive," as if this solution would have been obvious to a five-year-old, or even an unusually intelligent dog.  Bruce is an awfully nice person, however.  He's never obnoxious about it.  I'm sure he knows that I'm a computer nitwit, but really doesn't think less of me for it.

He didn't even give me a hard time when I had him come in and look at my document projector, which I used frequently in my environmental science class.  "The interface seems to be working," I said, pointing to the light on the box that said, "Interface."  (Not that I knew what that meant, but it seemed to be a hopeful sign.)  "It's just that the lights on the projector won't come on.  And I changed the bulbs last month, I don't think it's that."

It took Bruce approximately 2.8 milliseconds to locate a switch on the side of the projector that said "Lights."  It was right next to the power switch, so evidently in my fumbling around for the power switch some time earlier that day, I had accidentally turned off the light switch.  This made the lights not come on.  Funny thing, that.

A principal I once worked for used to call me "The Dinosaur."  He made two rather trenchant, and sadly accurate, comments about me; first, that given my teaching style, I would be at home in an 18th century lecture hall; and second, that if I could figure out a way to have my students turn in their homework chiseled on slabs of rock, I probably would.  I still remember being reluctant to switch from old fashioned handwritten gradebooks to computer grade-calculation software, and I recall that I finally made the switch in the year 2000.  The reason I remember is that he quipped that I had only entered the 20th century when it was about to end.

I can't really argue with any of that.  I guess we all have our approaches to learning, and the fact that I'm more comfortable with the old-fashioned, non-technological approach is just something I have to learn to compensate for.  I try to push the envelope and learn about computer-based applications when I can, but the fact remains that I'm probably going to continue to hand-letter most of my documents on rolls of parchment for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, I probably ought to finish up this post and get ready for work.  If I don't go wake the hamster up soon, he'll still be in the shower when my first class starts.

Cargo cults, John Frum, and Prince Philip

The subject of how religions begin is an interesting one.  The conventional explanation is that they start because of people looking for supernatural explanations for natural events -- thunder, wind, earthquakes, rain -- and eventually those supernatural explanations become accreted with rituals, deities and subdeities, priesthoods, and so on.  And in fact, in most polytheistic religions, many of the functions of the gods are related to such natural phenomena.

However, the few cases where we have actual data on the origin of religions turn out to be considerably more interesting than that.  If you go to certain islands in the South Pacific, you run into "cargo cults" -- religions that are under a hundred years old, and whose beginnings are fairly clear.  Apparently during the colonization of the Pacific Islands by Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s, there were multiple instances of guys in light planes landing on small islands, and suddenly finding themselves surrounded by natives who had never seen an airplane before.  The pilots, perhaps in fear for their safety, doled out the cargo they had on board as gifts, and before leaving, promised to come back with more.

That was all it took; more than one island now has a "cargo cult" -- the worship of a deity who comes from the sky, dispenses "cargo" in great abundance, and promises to come back one day bringing great wealth for all and sundry.  In the most famous of these, the John Frum cult of the island of Tanna, they even have built ceremonial landing strips to encourage their deity, "John Frum," to return.  They believe he will return on February 15 (John Frum Day), and on that day every year there are celebrations and sacrifices and rituals.

It is interesting that these beliefs have survived modernization.  The natives now know all about airplanes; they have knowledge of the rest of the world; it must be an easy leap to see that John Frum was an ordinary guy, probably an American or European pilot (perhaps "John Fromme?"  Or maybe "John from America" or "John from England" or some such?), and given that he first visited in the 1930s he is almost certainly dead by now.  But even knowing all that, they still worship him as a deity, and hope fervently for his return.  As I've had reason to comment before, with the majority of humanity, belief trumps both facts and logic.

I just learned about another such belief system, one I'd never heard of -- also on Tanna, interestingly enough.  A small group there, the Yaohannen tribe, worship Prince Philip of England as a deity.  They simultaneously believe he is a god, and also consider him part of their family; he is said to be descended from one of their spirit ancestors, and one day, they believe, he will come to live amongst them, aiding them in their pig-hunting and farming.  (Myself, I rather enjoy the image of Prince Philip engaging in a pig hunt.) 

Apparently, the whole thing started when Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth made a visit to Tanna in 1974.  Village elders had sent a pig to England as a propitiatory gift years earlier (it's unclear if the pig ever made it there), and sent a message to Philip to inquire as to what had happened to the pig.  He responded by sending them a framed photograph of himself, which is a rather peculiar response, but perhaps in keeping with how in touch with the common people the members of royal families tend to be.

In any case, however strange the response seems to me, it was a great hit amongst the Yaohannen -- and a new religion was born.  They built a shrine in his honor, where they keep the photograph, along with any other pictures, souvenirs, and newspaper clippings that mention His Holy Name.

And when they found out a few weeks ago that their god's grandson, Prince William, was getting married, it was a cause of enormous joy for them.  They have declared a week-long celebration, dancing, and feasting.  Their dearest wish, their leaders have said, is to have a photograph of Prince William and Kate Middleton to place in their shrine alongside the one of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth. 

Myself, I hope they get it.  As religions go, this one seems pretty benign.  Prince Philip, for his part, has been remarkably game -- a few years ago, they sent him a nalnal (a ceremonial hunting club), and Philip posed with it, had his photograph taken, and sent them the photograph.  The photograph is now proudly displayed with other pictures in Philip's shrine.  I'm hoping that Philip doesn't really think he's a deity, however.  Throughout history there have been royals who were unclear on that point, and it seldom ended well.  But for now, fortunately, he seems to be taking it all in stride.

Black-Eyed Children and the power of imagination

One of the creepiest paranormal stories currently circulating has to do with the "Black-Eyed Children."

The whole thing apparently started in 1998, when journalist Brian Bethel posted a story on a newsgroup describing an encounter he'd allegedly had.  (You can read a detailed account of it here.)  He was sitting in his car in a parking lot in Abilene, Texas, and he was approached by two unusually eloquent children who asked him to give them a ride.  He was about to unlock his door and let them in when he noticed that their eyes were black -- no iris, no whites, just solid, glossy, inky black.  He rolled his window up and gunned the motor, and the children became angry and insistent.  Fortunately for Bethel (he claims), he was able to drive away.

Since that time, there have been numerous other reports of Black-Eyed Children.  They always attempt to get the unwary to let them into a car or house, often with pitiful stories ("I'm lost and I need to get home, my parents will be so worried").  In one case, from Mexico, a Black-Eyed Child begged a man to carry him, saying, "My feet hurt so much, I can't walk, and if you don't carry me, I'll never get home."  No one seems to be quite sure what the children are trying to accomplish, and I was unable to find any reports from people who'd actually acquiesced to their demands.  Maybe anyone who does what the children ask is *cue scary music* never heard from again.

This urban legend/tale of the paranormal is chilling on a number of grounds.  First, it involves children, which somehow makes it scarier.  The combination of innocence and amorality that is commonplace in perfectly normal young children has made the idea of "evil children" fruitful ground for makers of horror movies (The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Bad Seed, to name just three).  That they would somehow try to accomplish their wicked ends by wheedling their way into your home or car is a pretty shiver-inducing idea.

Then, there's the thing about the eyes.  There's something special about eyes; it is telling, I think, that they're referred to as "the windows of the soul."  Stephen King writes, in his masterful analysis of horror stories, Danse Macabre,

Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of the places we can be had...  Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common...  But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye.  We all understand that the eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft.  Maybe that's the worst.

It's hard to know if Bethel made up the original Black-Eyed Children story, or whether he was the victim of a prank by some kids with black contact lenses (such things exist, as do slit-pupilled ones -- one of my students gave me a good scare with a pair of those, once).  Predictably, I don't believe that there really are creepy demon-children out there trying to get into people's cars.  But having their eyes be solid black certainly adds a nice little frisson to the story.

Last, I think this story is scarier for its subtlety.  When you think of the bare facts of the original tale, nothing really happened.  We are not told, and therefore are left free to imagine, what the intentions of the children were, what they'd have done to Bethel if they'd gotten into the car, and (most fundamentally) who they were.  And I don't know about you, but my imagination can come up with ghastlier explanations than anything real could possibly be.  I suspect it's even capable of exceeding the Scare Quotient of most plots from horror movies.  I'm always more frightened by what I don't see than I am by what I do -- for example,  I think that the scariest scene in The Sixth Sense is when the main character is locked in a closet by bullies, and all you hear is his gasps and screams, and thumping around -- and then silence.

Man, there could have been anything in that closet with him.

In any case, reports of Black-Eyed Children have continued to circulate, ever since Bethel's first posting thirteen years ago.  If you'd like to read a few accounts, go to here or here.  (Not recommended reading for night time, or when you're alone in the house...)  As you might expect, I'm not prepared to give these accounts any other explanation than human imagination and the love of a good scary tale, and possibly a well-executed prank or two.  But I have to admit that reading them does send a chill skittering its way up my spine -- just proving that even skeptics are not immune to creepy stories.